Dorm of the Dead (DVD)

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Dorm of the Dead DVD (click for larger image)Starring Jackey Hall, Andrea Ownby, Tiffany Shepis, Ciara Richards, Adrianna Eder

Directed by Donald Farmer

Distributed by Under the Bed Films


So you wanna make a horror movie, huh?

Ok, let’s see. What do you need? Well, you have to have girls. You can’t have a good horror movie without girls. Yeah, hot girls…That can act? No, that’s not so important…you need girls that will take off their clothes! Oh Yeah! Definitely have to have some titties! And maybe you could even get two of them to make out…with each other! Oh Damn! Now you’re talkin’!

Now we have the girls, what’s next?

How about an original monster that no one’s ever seen before? Nah, that takes too much thought, let’s do vampires…No…We’ll do zombies! Oh Yeah! Cool!

Do you need anything else?

Nope, girls and zombies! That’s all you need!

What about a story? Why would you need a story you have the girls…and zombies…don’t forget the zombies!

Now what?

SHUT UP! You just got those two girls to make out!

Sweeeeet!

Now take that scenario, throw it into a college setting, and you’ve got Dorm of the Dead. Exciting right? Yeah, if you’ve been staring at a blank wall for ten years waiting for the plaster to crack! I have sat through some mind numbingly insipid shit before, but I’ll be damned if Dorm of the Dead didn’t just define an entirely new level of Hell for me!

Low budget horror will always fall back on the “kitchen cupboard zombie”, I know that. I have come to expect it from indie horror. Whatever. My problem with them is that the stories are usually lame, the acting is sub-par (just being nice…that doesn’t happen often so deal with it), the effects are shitty, and the directors don’t have enough of an imagination to come up with something better than zombies so their “vision” sucks!

Sometimes I find myself surprised, even by a zombie flick, by how unique or well done it is. Dorm of the Dead is NOT one of those films. Instead it is the same old tired, badly applied green face paint zombie laden bullshit film that makes me want to raise the dead myself just to show these fuck-nuts what a REAL zombie should look like! If you’re going to do zombies, at least put a little more effort into it than an intern trying to get out from underneath the President’s desk!

Go to the Halloween Store and find a blister pack of zombie make-up and buy it! Oh, and make sure you get more than a 2-ounce squeeze tube of fake blood so that you don’t have to worry about running out. That way you can actually make it look like a person is being consumed instead of having it look more like they might have to worry about the lipstick marks on their collar when they get home.

And here’s a novel idea…when you have two characters interacting in the script (if you have one), let’s try putting them in the same fucking room! Dorm of the Dead looked as if the entire cast had PFA’s out against each other and weren’t allowed within fifty feet of one another! One would be in a blue-toned room and the other would be in a brightly lit classroom…but wait…I think they were talking to each other! WTF?

Trying to get into Dorm of the Dead‘s story is about as pointless as…well as pointless as Dorm of the Dead itself! It bounces around more than tits on a trampoline!

As far as I could make out there was a dorm where zombies attack this guy, and then Tiffany Shepis gets caught making out with a redheaded girl by her crazy boyfriend. She runs away from him and gets turned into a zombie in a basement. Then there’s this Goth girl, and she has a friend, but she has some enemies, too. There’s a professor who has zombie blood and sleeps with a student, but then he uses the blood to turn her into a zombie. Then the Goth girl’s enemy steals the zombie blood and uses it on the Goth girl…and really, I’m getting dumber just trying to recall the stupidity.

And to think that in the first few minutes of the movie I was actually hopeful. For a brief moment I found myself looking past the terrible acting, bad green face paint, and sorry bite wounds lacking all substance and blood. Yes, I looked past all those things so I could watch the great zombie up-skirt on screen. Too bad all my interest was replaced by an overwhelming urge to hunt down the people responsible for the shiny plastic disc that was spinning in my now tainted DVD player and giving them first-hand experience with flesh wounds!

The most interesting part of the DVD is when they hand the camera over to Shepis during a behind-the-scenes look at the film. Not only is the girl adorable, she’s insanely funny (heavy on the insane). I was happy (yet somehow saddened) to hear her admit to having to pay the rent. Personally I may have chosen the homeless route, but then again it did look like they at least had fun working on the film.

Special Features
Behind-the-Scenes featurette
Trailers

Film:

1 1/2 out of 5

Special Features:

3 out of 5

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